12 Unique Content Amplification Techniques That Earn 327% More Links

We all had that moment when we gave our soul into a post and made it so shiny, with thorough research, relevant visuals but nobody read it. And then you start wondering what went wrong. What in the name of God happened? Or why did it happen to you? And the questions could go on. But there is something that you missed. And that “something” could be content amplification.

Content amplification is a powerful method to reach a wider audience and multiply your links by hundreds. Or so it should be, if used effectively. Amplifying your content should be mandatory if you want people to know about it and increase your website traffic. You can look at the amplification process as a way of strengthening the signals of your post.

The journey shouldn’t stop when the article goes live. On the contrary, you should carry on with the process of boosting your content. You need to understand that content amplification isn’t a single technique or a one-time thing. It incorporates an umbrella of multiple unique techniques you need to follow in order to amplify content and get better results. And since it is a long process that needs a lot of attention and passion, we’ve built a highly documented list with 12 unique content amplification techniques that will help you earn links.

1. Work Out the Art of Link Giving to Generate Authoritative Backlinks

Link giving is the next big thing! Described as a way of requesting a link from authority websites in return for a more powerful link to their website, link giving is a smart way of amplifying your content and building links without violating Google’s guidelines. Let’s see how it works. Imagine you would like to write about bad habits that kill your creativity. You should apply as a contributor on an authority website such as Forbes, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, The Huffington Post, Boomerang or something similar and you have the possibility to write your article and link to a blog you’d like to collaborate with. After you attain authority on that website, you can reach out to them for a quote to let them know that their names appear on a website with thousands of visitors. Your post must be a linkable asset. The next step you should do is to ask for a citation of another piece of content (for example your blog) where they are cited. That’s basically how the link giving technique works.

It is a long process, but if it is planned carefully, you have a higher chance of success. You need to be a remarkable writer to become a valuable member of the contributors’ community and give to the visitors that “AHA” moment when they read your content.

Another solution would be to start working for a contributor as a ghost writer. It means to write in other people’s name. If you decide to do that, you’ll skip the phase when you have to make a name for yourself as a contributor.

2. Reach New Audiences Through Native Advertising

Native advertising is a unique technique to amplify your content and get featured on a network of publishers. The nice part about this type of advertising is that it is not so easily ignored compared to a banner ad. The native ad takes form into an interesting blog post or infographic.

Source: sharethrough.com

The advantage of native advertising is that it can absorb new audiences and gain a higher number of impressions than a banner ad. Outbrain, Taboola, Zemanta, are just a few examples that can help you create native advertising.

IPG Media Lab and Sharethrough conducted a study on 4,770 participants to study behaviors and perceptions towards native ads using both eye tracking technology and surveys and saw that consumers looked at native ads 52% more frequently than banner ads.

3. Get More Likes, Shares and Follows with Smart Social Buttons

Having social buttons on your website shows how many likes, shares on each social media channel you have for a post. It’s a social proof. It’s a vanity metric, offering validation that your piece of content is valuable. We are not talking about paid tweets or facebook ads but about the real time owned media. The effects of social buttons show an increase of the credibility for your brand. These buttons will help the visitors amplify your content.

Yotpo conducted a study showing that sharing a review for a brand will boost traffic, engagement, and conversions.

Source: www.yotpo.com

Having smart social buttons isn’t the recipe for success. If your content is vapid and doesn’t express any feeling, it’s unlikely someone will share it even though you have the most interesting social buttons. To have shareable content means much more than that. You need to have engaging content to be spread like fire in the online media and bring those “tasty” links.

4. Give Shoutouts to Amplify Your Content

When you’re writing an article, and you’re citing well-known experts in the industry, would you like them to know? That’s why shoutouts exist. You need to append “featuring @nickname” before launching your article on the social media platforms to amplify your post. It is a good chance to hook a few to read it. And although the influencer outreach is not new under the sky, shoutouts are a good way to connect your brand with relevant and important names.

On top of that, it is an easy and useful way to thank people for their brainpower and even build a relationship. You can use it on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. This is just an example:

5. Outperform Your Content Through Paid Social Amplification

Amplify your content with paid social amplification. Easy to say, hard to do, you might say. Well, not really. Paid social amplification could be an easy way to promote your post on multiple channels. Almost all social media platforms have paid content amplification options. The traditional paid social amplification methods include Twitter ads, Google + post ads, Facebook ads. To change the traditional course a little bit, you can import your email list into Facebook’s Audience to market people who are interested in your brand, install the remarketing pixel, create dynamic display ads on Adwords.

Using paid social amplification is like building a social media megaphone.

Adam Root, a founding partner at Tricent Capital, says that the social platforms should be used based on the purpose.

“Use Twitter to gain new users, Facebook to build a community and LinkedIn to generate leads for the sales team” – Adam Root.

He argues that Twitter is a good social media platform to determine your audience to take action, Facebook is social networking website where you can engage your readers and create relationships on the long-term and Linkedin is a business network that connects high-profile agencies and professionals you’d want as clients.

In every situation, you should have the message associated with the visual. Creating a synergy is important. Humor has worked wonder since forever. Along the years a lot of studies have been conducted to see the results of an ad that uses humorous messages. Advertising books say that humor is more likely to capture and hold audience attention. Take for example the next display ad:

Source: www.wordstream.com

It sticks to your mind, doesn’t it?

6. Use Storytelling to Receive a Social Boost

Stories sell. That’s a demonstrated fact. Not all of us grew up listening to stories but I don’t think there is a single person in this world who didn’t tell a story. We tell stories around the campfire, in the class, at a beach party, at our job, we take photographs, we tweet and so on. But there is a difference between a good story and a great one. You need to put a personal touch in everything you write to connect with your readers.

The people from Pixar movies say that every story should connect to people on an emotional level.

Using storytelling to receive social boost is a beneficial amplification strategy. Storify lets you create timeless stories using various forms of multimedia that you can share online afterward. It is a unique combination of writing, video, audio and visual content put in a timeline order to engage the readers and let them see a chronological progress about a topic. If used properly, the story can go viral.

The Denver Post’s Storify page won a Pulitzer Award in 2013 for its coverage of the Aurora theater shooting from Colorado. The Storify page became viral, and the site received more links than usual. We cannot put our money on it, but we think the Storify page is one of the reasons why this happened. You can see a screenshot below with the growth of the site’s link profile:

www.denverpost.com

A great feature of this tool is the notify area where you can select this option and send a notification on Twitter to the people mentioned in the story.

7. Try Email Outreach to Build a Solid Community Within Your Brand

Email outreach is a white hat search engine optimization technique you should master. Besides its many beneficial purposes, one of the most valuable is increasing content amplification.

A successful experience using email outreach to amplify content comes from a case study by Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko. The subject of this case study is Emil Shour, content manager at SnackNation. He used the skyscraper technique for email outreach to generate 41,992 pageviews.

Source: backlinko.com

The strategy started with finding an excellent keyword after a thorough research, then looking at the competition for that keyword. That meant taking a look at the content Google shows on the results page, the type of content found there, understanding the trends, seeing the lack of information and taking advantage of that. Make a list/structure with the facts you want to debate in your post. Don’t leave out any savory details! Enrich your content with spicy pictures. Now is when the idea of email outreach comes in. You can ask experts to contribute with ideas to rank number one and overflow of links and traffic.

Before you publish your piece, you can email influencers to get the word out and ask them whether they would be interested to read (without asking for a link) a piece of paper relevant to their niche. Emil Shour sent a pre-outreach email looking something like this:

Source: backlinko.com

Then, after he received an answer from them, he sent an email with the link to the published article. In the end, the outcome was very good, receiving contextual links, traffic, revenue. Proceeding this way, you have a better rate of success.

8. Use Content Syndication on Medium to Build Your Blog Audience

An excellent way to maximize the effectiveness of your content amplification is through content syndication. It is important to include this strategy in your content marketing plan.

It can help you reach other niches and promote your content on different media and websites. Basically, it means pushing your content on third party websites to a full article, snippet, link, or thumbnail. There is not a one-size-fits-all way for content syndication, but rather multiple approaches. Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Watch are a good example to get featured among experts and offer news and trends.

Medium is another way to promote your content and provide audience. On the site, you can publish the whole post or just a snippet. You can create an account for free and then import your article. After you finish, you’ll see the next message at the end of your story:

9. Collaborate with Influencers to Earn Links

Your influencer marketing campaign should focus on building advocacy around your brand and amplifying your content to earn links, not shares and mentions. Tweets and shares get lost amongst other tweets and shares, but links enrich your backlink profile and help you rank higher.

A benefit from collaborating with influencers is the fact that they send relevancy signals to the content, showing it offers valuable information.

Influencers are picky, and they choose to work with you if they see it is relevant, content worthy and they have a benefit from it.

Make sure you’ve thought of everything before you launch your collaboration project.

You can ask influencers to answer some of your questions to get them featured on your blog, or you could ask them to get your brand featured on their blog. For example, we asked 13 link building experts a few questions about the Penguin update and the results followed. Social or content amplification is the process where you need to go that extra mile. Yet, it’s all worth it.

10. Post on StumbleUpon and Absorb Targeted Traffic

StumbleUpon is really an interesting platform to use to spread your site on the web. It is easy to see how the platform works. You need to create an account if you don’t have one yet and wait 24 hours before you submit your first page. To submit your link, you need to fill in a form similar with the one below:

It is important to set the interest for the link to get featured in the right category and target the right users.

There are a few things that need to be taken into consideration. You can’t submit commercial webpage on StumbleUpon, only a few links from the same domain are accepted, and if your account is used for promotional activity, you’ll risk getting your account suspended or terminated.

To get the full experience you could use StumbleUpon and Paid discovery feature together. For example, Kim Roach from Buzzblogger got 201,126 visitors using those two. She wrote an article about Top 30 inspirational picture quotes to rock your day; to make her content visible she started with an investment of $100, which brought her 1,000 visitors. Then she let her piece of content become viral, and that’s how she received almost 200,000 organic visitors.

11. Develop Advocates Through GaggleAMP

GaggleAMP is a tool that helps you reach amplification and social media engagement. It has the power to strengthen the distribution of your content through different networks, to align your employees in the digital engagement strategy, build actionable reports to show trends and measure performance. The platform has the power to create, implement content driven marketing campaigns by tapping into employee, partner and customer advocates.

Gaggle refers to employees, potential customers or current customers, and partners or other stakeholders who receive a notification when a new piece of content is published and they are encouraged to share it. The people included in the gaggle group can choose which content to share.

Start with a smaller group of people who are active on social media and already share your content.

Then you will adapt to the way before you grow it. Begin by engaging your advocates, talk with them, acknowledge their effort by sharing information about your brand and content. Keep them up-to-date with the changes from every social media platform. Encourage them by offering them support. You can think of a reward and recognition campaign for sharing the message.

It is an effective platform to create advocates and amplify content.

12 . Integrate Promotion Messages or Buttons in Your Website

A free pass for link earning through amplifying your content is having a promotion message or button on your site. So make sure you’ve integrated it into your website. A promotion message can take the form of a website pop-up showing a clear incentive with a strong CTA, a slider for a juicy offer or a headline bar with clever headline matching your content. A promotion message can increase the traffic and amplify your content by choosing the proper type. AddThis offers different tools for its users by implementing simple ways to share and promote their content. No matter what you decide to do, it is highly important to have social buttons. So make sure you include them on your site regardless of any digital marketing strategy you choose to implement.

If you your pop-up message is creative enough, you could be mentioned on other sites and therefore earn a link. For example, Justuno wrote a post on their blog about 10 Inspiring Examples of Email Pop Up Designs and Why They Work, and a few brands got mentioned. Below you can see a screenshot from their blog:

The Wee Squeak received a link mention due to a smart pop-up message.

There are a few things you need to remember in order to nail your pop up message:

have a strong CTA;

show personality;

use qualitative images that match your message;

offer a valuable benefit to the user to make him take action;

fit the design of the pop up with your brand colors and website style;

don’t be intrusive

Conclusion

Getting more and more people to read your piece of content remains a high priority for many marketers. It is still a long debated subject. Marketers love media monitoring. We all know it. We are always asking after publishing a blog post “how many people saw it?”. Are there any conversion rates generated? And if yes, how many out of paid media and how many out of organic traffic? On top of the social media marketing strategy come links. You need to think of the long term. If your content is an outstanding piece, people will link to it, but you need to give it a push just to get it rolling on the ground. There are many content amplification services and tools out there that can help you out with this. But no matter what content amplifier you are using, your content needs to be exceptional.

There is no content amplification definition or formula, be it lead generation or sponsored content, that will make you automatically win links. It is effective content, content distribution, media monitoring, content strategy and earned media that will take you there. No matter what you do, keep in mind your main purpose, target and aim: the user.

Get the help of content amplification tools mentioned above, but most importantly follow the previous 12 techniques to amplify your content, earn links and improve your online marketing. There are inbound marketers and niche communities who say that quality content is enough. And indeed, if you put great content in front of your marketing strategy, it can be driving traffic and users. Yet, it might not be enough. Content writing is great but you need to amplify it in order for it to be effective. You can start earning links using the actionable content amplification strategies listed above in the article.

As mentioned earlier, there is no guaranteed content marketing strategy that will take you on the edge of success. But the previous 12 unique techniques for content amplification are a damn good starting point.

Andreea is an enthusiastic Copywriter @ cognitiveSEO who has a love for creativity and writing. When she is not watching for the 10th time the TV series Friends, she enjoys a good book and a glass of rose wine. She likes to see life from different angles (and cities).
Motto: Eat, think and travel often.

9 Comments.

Hi Andreea, great post. Number 9 ‘Collaborate with Influencers to Earn Links’ is one of my favourite and most successful ways of gaining links and increasing the visibility of my website.

However, the article doesn’t show any data of these content amplification techniques earning 327% more links. I’ve no doubt these methods can indeed do that, I was just wondering if you have any physical data showing this increase.

Thanks for your fantastic article. Anyone can easily understand this article. I came to know lots of new things. I think some of my friends want this stuff. It’s totally worth able to share with my friends.

I am a Link Builder and your tips are great! We do a lot of guest posting but it’s a lot of work, to be honest. What we lately did: Watch out for content gaps reading conversations in relevant forums, etc. We wrote exactly what people where asking for, posted those Links in the forums and reached out to some interesting webmasters, who wrote about similar topics. Most of those webmasters linked to our new content piece because we filled the gap of their content. 😉